technically speaking, I'm living the dream. survived med school. now a naturopathic physician specializing in treating mental health concerns. I'm a licensed doctor. in reality, I'm still in the process of learning to be a physician with soul. this blog is dedicated to my struggles to this end.

Saturday, March 9, 2013

Today, I spent a bit of the day amongst a few intuitive
healers. Each healer sported a particular personality; each taught by being
his true self. The oldest and wisest among them had a presence that could be
felt from at least 50 feet away. Perhaps of Percheron descent, he stood tall,
white-haired, and weathered like Gandalf or Dumbledore. His aged years meant that he connected seamlessly
and more readily than the other teacher healers to us, the student healers.

He taught the lesson
on being present and grounded in this work. Massive hooves planted. His
strength and power most obvious, it was the stillness—the calm, quiet, presence that almost felt out of place for one of such stature. I’m not sure how he reigned
in such seemingly disparate parts. The royal, stately, Duke, fit for a king, equally comfortable as the gentle soul allowing some weeping into his mane. He immediately honed in on the fact that I wasn’t
fully present when I approached him, and turned away mirroring my absence. How did he know that I was
holding tension in my gut? How did he tap into all of this without words? His intuitive powers almost seemed harnessed from the
magical realm.

Wednesday, March 6, 2013

It is the stories that one cannot write that most haunt the
mind. The words that will not lend themselves nicely to the page. The ones that refuse
to play out into some sort of tightly-knit Aesop’s Fable lesson. The ones that dig
heels in and cannot be shaped or sculpted into something creative or beautiful.
These images sit like space occupying lesions to borrow the language the Oncologists use.

Put it down for a
while. Leave it here.

One had no idea something so simple could be so hard.

Put it down for a
while. Take a break from it.

But, what if no one else will carry it? What if no one else
will bear to look into the glow? What if no one else will search for answers where the questions are unseen?

Sunday, February 24, 2013

One of the key advantages of being a member of the helping
profession is the opportunity afforded to observe closely, the breadth and
depth of all sorts of human experience. Like peering at the whale of humanity
from the bottom of the ocean, the underbelly swimming above, far off floating silhouette
of your long lost boat, the murky dark edges do appear to go on forever.

I think I get why this
perspective could make you feel anxious and sad all at once.

Or hanging upside down in the cave of bats while the blood
rushes to your head, I think I get why it
feels especially difficult to think and your throbbing head feels as if it
might explode. In the sacred context
of the doctor patient relationship, I often find myself on a journey outside of
my own perspective, led around vicariously through dark experiences, by my
patients.

Most of the time, I can’t help but come away from this
sacred space a little bit transformed. Sitting with wounded people, my own perspective
often has to expand to hold the space for things percolating beneath the
surface of polite conversation, the place where you’re frightened of the dark, or scared of bears, and the monsters under the bed try to grab your feet when you dive under the covers as the lights go off. I feel privileged every time I step softly
into this psychic space with my patients.

The oft cited words of my mentor echo, Your patients will teach you much if you
allow the space for it. I remember
thinking before graduating that Obi Wan Kenobi was just trying to make me feel
more ready for the shift to being a physician. He’s just trying to make me feel better as I’m lambasted with
graduation and that overwhelming sense that levels most of us new doctors in a
sea of feeling as if we really know absolutely nothing.

He’s trying to make me
feel better about cutting the educational, umbilical cord.

The truth is my patients do teach me much. Every day. They
teach with their individual perspectives on their collectively similar
tragedies. Everybody bleeds this way, just
the same.

Sometimes I think doing this helping work is a bit like
living a bunch of different lives simultaneously. I walk around with a rolodex of others' experiences in my head. I hear the talk of people sitting around the table, walled in by their own narrow perspective, trapped by assumptions or stories they've told themselves for years. It can't be otherwise. He must not even care.

I realize I'm no different in telling myself stories. But, I get the gift of sitting regularly with the heavyhearted. I get the opportunity of gaining insight by being absent from my own perspective
for a while, then returning. I get to be an astronaut drifting in space, looking freshly at the blue and green earth swirls. The Overview Effect its been called. My own story smacks me in the face in a new way. Gifts
I didn’t see before stare back at me. Things taken for granted assault me.

I didn’t really have
it all that bad.In fact, things were
mostly, good in my childhood. My life is rich.

And sometimes the perspective transformation, the blinding re-entry burns a bit more
radically and I’m left tumbling my way back into the atmosphere to some sort of spirituality that makes sense of experiences so far from my own. I have to rely on the bells that have stopped jingling from
my ankles, praying that the tether to Big Oak Tree on the edge of the forest somehow holds well enough for someone to pull me back and help me land.

Monday, February 18, 2013

I don’t know why I sit here tears
dripping, under the moon. Crickets scratching their legs, the sound of the
freeway in the distance. I have no reason to be sad. No badness of a day, no
complete and utter failures, nothing went all that wrong, today. In fact, things
wentmostly right.

I haven’t really thought of my brother in a long time, even thinking of him
now, that’s not it.

Instead, there’s the cool night air, Seussian silhouettes all around.

Looking up into the sky, halo around the moon’s fullness, little dark spots on
it’s circle, I feel something, I know not what. And that something feels like
sadness. And I have no idea why I’m weeping at the moon.

Sunday, January 20, 2013

I wrote this as a student. As a conscientious student, I remember feeling the angst of how annoyed the front desk girls were with me. As weird as it sounds, they were most angered by the students who actually did their homework. Because it demanded time and energy from them. They had to pull the charts. They had to work on Saturdays to help us. The ones who showed up on weekends to research their patient's charts...This was me working out my angst in poem form.

I know it must seem that I’m always at your window

waiting

to bug you,

asking for a chart, or even for
a stack,

or for you to access

that all-powerful schedule that reigns over both of our lives.

my furrowed brow might seem to convey anger.

in reality,

I’m concentrating

on the next thing

Mr. Attending asked me to do,

after he told me

how wrong I was

the last time.

forgetting

might suggest

that I’m not taking the teaching seriously, enough.

and sometimes, only sometimes,

furrowing my brow

making it harder

for the tears to stream

down my face

when I’ve fucked something up,

yet again.

I know it must seem

I’m demanding so much

on the days

when I come back

like some adolescent.

pulling up to the drive-up In and Out.

I imagine

it is rather annoying.

what now?

you must think

as I approach for the umpteenth time.

in reality,

some days the demanding weights

almost crush.

world full of Attendings

residents

patients

professors

pulling,

in multiple directions,

usurping or contradicting one another.

never doing enough.

never learning enough.

chart note, never quite right enough.

sometimes, crazy as it is

I lighten my load

creating a delusional reality

where

I’m not the one being pushed around.

I know it must seem that I’m moody as I stand here

waiting.

in reality,

I'm pausing,

catching my breath
as my patient just left.
the conversation we had took effort.